Continual innovation is at the base of the Lightflow Rendering Interface.
A completely modular and procedural approach has been
adopted from the ground up to allow constant
growth with time.

The key idea is to produce a live software
project able to modify itself according to
new hardware technologies, without ever loosing
its solid consistency and always mantaining the
best speed to quality ratio.

This strategy has already shown its benefits by
producing an incredible list of features in a few
years' development.

Technical Report

network management
A powerful proxy solution has been added to allow
automatic dispatch of rendering on mulitple machines.

multithreaded rendering
Multiple processors can be used to compute both
single images and animations at a faster speed.

caustics
Beautyful light patterns are formed by specular
reflectors and refractors such as chromed
surfaces, water and glasses.
The Multiway Ligth Channels provide a
flexible mechanism to perform light redirection
even using imaginary reflection paths.

sub-pixel displacement mapping
Automatic displacement mapping is performed on
all the geometric types, from simple spheres to
complex NURBS. This feature, combined with
perfect procedural patterns, can provide
incredible surface details that would be
impossible to model by hand.

distributed ray-tracing
Blurred reflections and refractions enhance the
rendering quality by a great factor, overcoming
the classical unnaturally sharp appearence of
ray-traced images.

volumetric rendering
Realistic clouds, colloids and light beams can
now be modeled in three dimensions without using
any trick.

hypertextures
Solid surfaces can be automatically extracted from
three dimensional mathematical patterns and
volumetric data. This feauture will allow realistic
display of medical images and complex fluid
simulations.

NURBS
Standard implementation of trimmed NURBS
surfaces allows complete compatibility with the
most modern CAD/CAM and modeling systems.

blobs
Standard implementation of blobs (also known as
metaballs), for advanced organic modelling.

B-REPS
Boundary representation of solids makes
boolean operations easy even on the most complex
parametric and implicit geometries.

high-quality procedural patterns
More than 40 procedural patterns will allow the
user to reproduce whatever surface appearence.
The images in this document show a variety of
simple combinations of these powerful shading
blocks, such as the calm and moved ocean waves,
some soft 3d clouds and many types of marble and
wood. None of them used a digitized texture.

lens effects
Astonishing realism is reached without great
modeling efforts by an accurate use
of the automatic depth of field and light
glowing capabilities.

All the images present in this document were created and rendered with
the Lightflow Rendering Tools by Jacopo
Pantaleoni, and they can be redistributed only with the
following copyright notice:Rendered with the Lightflow Rendering Tools.Copyright 1998-2000, by Jacopo Pantaleoni. All rights reserved.